The hallmark of pyramid schemes (masquerading as something legitimate under an innocent-sounding name like multi-level marketing) is false earnings claims. We at Pink Truth know that time and again, research shows that more than 99% of people LOSE MONEY in MLM.

Nonetheless, practically all you ever hear about is how much money participants are making. And these claims are largely lies. When confronted with the reality that so many people lose money in MLM, the companies themselves resort to excuses like “women don’t really want to make money with Mary Kay… they do it for fun and as a social outlet.”

We at Pink Truth are very familiar with the often-uttered phrase “My director makes six figures!!!!” Women believe the hype that Mary Kay Sales Directors are making big money. So how much money is “big money” and how many sales directors are making it?

Here are the numbers, straight from the horse’s mouth. From the August 2012 issue of Applause Magazine, we have the top 100 sales director incomes in each of the 5 divisions for April. These 500 sales directors represent the top 3.5% of all sales directors, and the top 0.07% (yes, way less than 1%) of all consultants in the United States. 

Written by The Scribbler

After Virgina Sole-Smith’s insightful article, “The Pink Pyramid Scheme: How Mary Kay Cosmetics Preys on Desperate Housewives” was published in Harper’s, it didn’t take long for Mary Kay supporters to ride in and angrily denounce the piece as being one-sided, imbalanced, and other knee-jerk accusations that contained exactly 0% forethought before being expressed.

One of these violently vocal supporters was Cynthia Ruccia, a 28-year Senior Sales Director with Mary Kay who – among other things – claimed she “made a 6-figure income for many years.”  Naturally, I’m not one to take Mary Kay leaders at face value, and so I promptly set out to uncover the truth.  Join me on this journey and before the end, you will see that it’s easier to put lipstick on a shark than it is to get a Mary Kay Sales Director to prove her income claims.

Every so often we like to take a look at the money women are making (or not) in Mary Kay. Today we are looking at national sales director Debi Moore. According to her unitnet website, she has 37 directors in her area. She posted the year-to-date retail of the top 15 directors through June 29, 2012. Of course, there was one more day left in the seminar area to convince women to order products they didn’t need, but for all intents and purposes the annual totals were in.

And here’s how the numbers shook out. I’ll explain more below.

Many recruits are snared into Mary Kay Cosmetics with the lure of executive earnings. They are told that the sky’s the limit, and the earnings are unlimited, if only you are willing to work hard enough. Sales directors tout their “highest checks” without ever mentioning all the business expenses that must be paid out of those checks, or that those are a one-time deal and don’t represent their normal commission checks.

The hard workers are the ones who make it big in Mary Kay, right? Wrong. One has to look no further than superstar Allison LaMarr, who was the fastest woman ever to make it to Mary Kay National Sales Director. Yet all of that hard work resulted in a downward spiral that culminated in Allison becoming the fastest quitter in Mary Kay history. She has flailed around since, attempting to be a personal coach, a failed participant  in multi-leve marketing company MLM Bellamora, a former “executive” for multi-level marketer Seacret Direct, and is now spinning her wheels trying to build a downline as a distributor for Seacret.

You know I love to get my hands on these things: the real, live numbers that prove how few people are actually making money in Mary Kay. Now let me set this up for you to prove that almost no one is making that “executive pay” in Mary Kay.

A sales director driving a Cadillac is supposed to do $96,000 wholesale production over two quarters. That works out to $16,000 wholesale per month, which equals a commission check of about $3,200 monthly (using an average commission rate of 20%). That equals $38,400 per year gross commission if the director is just meeting the Cadillac minimums. (And then you have all the business expenses that must be paid out of that!)

And there are plenty of Pink Cadillac drivers who don’t make the minimum production, so their commissions are even lower AND they have to pay extra money to the company to keep the car.

Written by DupedByPinkFriend

We frequently discuss some of the falsehoods and partial truths in the Mary Kay recruiting spiels that tend to hook women who are only looking to get their products at a discount, or just want to earn a few extra bucks per month, and have loads of fun while they’re at it.  There are many other scripts that you may have heard if someone is trying to recruit you, and these are designed to convince women that they can easily become wealthy and attain financial security with a Mary Kay career. Let’s just look at a few of the typical lines you were probably told; those lines that may be tempting you to jump in head first.

Here’s what a current Mary Kay sales director posted on her personal website:

I also am an Indpendent (sic) Sales Director with Mary Kay Cosmetics. I quit my full-time job more than 2 years ago and I’m making an executive income while working from home with my Mary Kay business. It’s amazing and more info can be found through my website: xxxxxxxxxxx.

Written by JTA

“The numbers don’t lie…” How many times have we heard that one? Well, the numbers are precisely what caused me to become disillusioned about this business and this company. A person in their right mind would not be able to look at the numbers I see and continue on.

Not so much my personal numbers, although I spent an extraordinary amount of time working, doing the “short term sacrifice for long term gain” thing. My schedule was 8am-10pm M-F, I worked on Saturday, too, and took off from 6pm Sat to 6pm Sunday and then got back on the phone. I was taught by other NSDs to only ‘relax’ those 24 hours so that I could become NSD more quickly.

Written by Nutmeg

I was recruited in 2005 by a friend (who quit immediately after ordering her $1800 and never selling any of it).  My director (who's a nat'l) had me order full inventory.  I have a very large network of friends and happened to be really good at selling the products.  I actually paid off my inventory and started making a profit after 4 months.  I was prompted to become a director.